Conceal that you have a knife. Hold it in your rear hand, low around waist level. When they come at you crouch like you're flinching.

Once they are on you (or close enough for goverment work), stab the **** out if their floating rib area (pointing up to hit lungs) shank the abdominal wall (internal organs) and especialy hit the crotchal regions (arteries and nerve centers). When they double over from multiple knife wounds to the gouche, stab the **** out of their neck (trachea and arteries).

Leave the sceene before you can be identified.

Basically your lead arm (empty hand) is a pick / range finder. Your weapon is back in the rear hand where it can't be easily grabbed or even seen without getting through your lead hand first. If they are engaged with your lead hand they are close enough for you to shank the **** out of them with your rear hand.

This set up is very important. If you lead with the knife it is much easier for your opponent to attepmt a disarm / de-fang against you. They have a clear target in plain sight. In the rear hand they will have to "wrassle" you just to get near the knife and there is no easy way to do that without getting cut the **** up. The potential anlges of attack are obscured. The length of the weapon is harder to guage. And there is no "clean" way to get to it without putting yourself at risk.

If you're real good you can do this without even revealing your knife at all. (I have seen it done IRL @ five block from where I'm typing this).

Mr Machette, I have some questions on the noble science of stabbing dudes

First: The fairbanks book talks about the great effect a stab on the belly has on the morale, why not start the fight by doing a quick lead hand feint to the face followed by a straight stab to the abs?

Second: How do avoid blood? I'm leaving the area after the fighting with the thug but what if some blood is on my clothes?

Mr Machette, I have some questions on the noble science of stabbing dudes

First: The fairbanks book talks about the great effect a stab on the belly has on the morale, why not start the fight by doing a quick lead hand feint to the face followed by a straight stab to the abs?

That's the ticket. It really depends on what your opponent is doing but what you have described is a perfectly sound shanking strategy.

Just don't let them gain or maintain control of either of you limbs. If they do, shank the crap out of whatever they are grabbing you with.

Originally Posted by RurikGreenwulf

Second: How do avoid blood? I'm leaving the area after the fighting with the thug but what if some blood is on my clothes?

You don't.

If your worried about your clothes giving you away there's methods for changing up your appearance and acting like nothing happened. Invisibility is a discipline all unto itself. ;)

First: The fairbanks book talks about the great effect a stab on the belly has on the morale, why not start the fight by doing a quick lead hand feint to the face followed by a straight stab to the abs?

That's Fairbairn, not Fairbanks. The tactic you're describing, when done simultaneously, is a big thing in the piper South African knife method. Its also one of five knife attacks in DBMA that uses the off hand first. Instead of a feint and a thrust, its more like a football stiffarm to the face with multiple thrusts to the abdomen as you continue driving forward. These off-hand-first attacks are not often trained against by martial artists, so if some smug one tells me to come at them with a rubber knife or sharpie or whatever, they're the attacks I tend to use.

Second: How do avoid blood? I'm leaving the area after the fighting with the thug but what if some blood is on my clothes?

Part of Marc Denny's knifework is this consideration, because a lot of criminal types have bloodborne diseases and a knife will cause it to come out in large volumes, and you don't want to be infected. Its actually a consideration that some FMAs incorporate too (not so much the disease part, but the consideration of blood in general).

There's a guy who teaches "Apache knife" that you can find with some googling. I don't think he's one of those "revived a thousand year old fighting art" kind of guys. He's a dude with a system based on sparring with training knives while wearing goggles, with some Native American wisdom peppered here and there I guess. Anyway, they knife spar with fake blood on the forearms, because it makes it difficult to grab with conventional grips, and one should be aware of this because there may be blood, rain, sweat, dirt, beer etc that makes an arm slippery. The park ranger where we used to spar was trained in this method, and he had some interesting things to say.